Productivity gurus...

I first started hearing about productivity experts about a year ago when I came across Tim Ferriss (although Tim is an expert on a lot of stuff) and his book called The Four Hour Work Week. The basic notion is that most business people are too wired and are in a state of information overload and so if they step back, prioritize, delegate (Tim has a bunch of MBAs in India doing some of his work for him), and unplug (his example is set up an auto response on your e-mail that says "I will only be checking e-mail at 11am and 4pm if this is urgent call" and he thinks your productivity will sky rocket). 

Yesterday, I watched the video below that is a part of the Google Talks series where Merlin Mann gives a talk titled "Time and Attention (Getting Things Done)".


I really think more people and companies need to look more closely at these techniques for how people better use their time. I really think most people are great procrastinators (me included) and checking e-mail or grabbing the crackberry are great ways to avoid what you need to focus on.  Merlin also makes a great point about the defaults within calendar applications for length of meetings.  When I was at Verizon every meeting was defaulted to 1hr regardless of weather it was a 5-10 min conversation and so it let people who had little to do waste a lot of other peoples time.  I know there are also a lot of agency people who could really benefit from some of these time saving/focusing techniques.